I know enough Chinese history to publicly state that any parallels between Grace Mugabe and Jiang Qing Mao are greatly exaggerated.
Whereas Chairman Mao's wife sought to maintain an establishment that had damaged China to a point where 30 million perished due to starvation, not to mention the millions who perished or were left badly traumatized by the misguided Cultural Revolution and the Cult of Mao, Grace Mugabe is doing the exact opposite. She is coming in as the antiestablishmentarian, getting rid of the cast of characters that have amassed great power and vast wealth by exploiting the trusted given unto them by her husband.
Both Mujuru and Mnangagwa are said to have milked the nation until nothing but raw blood was coming out of the tits of Mother Zimbabwe. Those of us who grew up tending cattle remember our elders warning us to not let nursing cows wander into the thickets of rivers valleys known to have been infested with mipurwa, giant lizards that incapacitate cows using said lizards' long tails as a rope to tie the hind legs of an unfortunate cow. Lassoed in this manner, the mupurwa lizard ravenously milks the cow until blood comes out of the adders. It is a very ugly scene. For this reason, we always had the natural urge to kill any mupurwa lizard if one was stupid enough to crawl out of its hiding nook.
What we have had to this point is an infestation of mipurwa lizards manifesting themselves as bipedal walking and talking human beings. The powers that were once in the hands of Mai Mujuru and Zibagwe Chirumanzu were equivalent to the rope-like tails and the forked tongues of the mipurwa lizards. Rumours of illegal diamond-and-gold-mining activities involving these two Zimbabwean political actors abound. As a general rule, I am not one to give any credence to such rumours. We have a nation known to have been producing vast sums of gold since ancient times such that it has been posited as the Biblical land of Ophir and or Havillah endowed with beautiful gold. However, when vast deposits of alluvial diamonds are discovered only to disappear without trace, even a person averse to rumours the way I am is bound to scratch the hair out of my head in great puzzlement.
If we think of the looters of our mineral wealth as the parasitic mipurwa lizards, why can anyone be blamed for looking upon Grace Mugabe as a compatriot on a mission to loop off the tails and tongues of mipurwa masquerading as our political leaders? For those of us who study the Bible, we ask for great forbearance when we point out that the human mipurwa are not very dissimilar from the Biblical dragon, a dreaded monster that was eventually put to sword by Archangel Michael. Perhaps Grace Mugabe is Archangel Michael dispatched to get rid of the numerous dragons in our halls and councils of power once and for all.
So, no, I see no congruences between Chairman Mao's wife and Robert Mugabe's wife. Of course it is very tempting to try to superimpose these two characters upon each other. If there are any similarities, they are patently superficial and, to people familiar with history, very specious. Jiang Qing Mao loved her monstrous dragons. Grace Mugabe, variously described by her enemies and detractors as a drunkard or someone crazed by the scent of power, has no time to tame and make pets out of mipurwa dragons. If she is truly mad, one day the entire nation will thank her for her brand of madness.
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